OLDaily

[link: 2 Hits] More blogging from Mesh. This comment is right on: "Live blogging... now that I'm blogging my way through mesh, I'm finding it helps me focus! It's not doing 2 things aat once, it's sort of like taking notes in a lecture, where you 'get' more of what's being said because you write it down." Yes. Exactly.
[Tags: Web Logs, Web 2.0] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: 8 Hits] Online video editing suites? Impossible! But Scott Leslie reviews two such services in this article, and admits being hooked on one of them. This is, after all, the year of video. [Tags: ] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: Hits] I am a former North American NTN Trivia champion. I played on a team, of course, the Inglewood Collective. Part of our success was due to our knowledge. But a big part of it was due to our ability to understand how to win trivia games. I remember one day winning a 'Raceway Trivia' game - despite knowing nothing about auto racing - by playing probabilities. This is, as educators have long pointed out (I read it first in Holt), what students learn in a lecture and test environment: how to pass the tests. So it should be no surprise to learn that schools, school boards, and now entire states are learning to game the system. "Many states have taken advantage of this autonomy to make their educational performance look much better than it really is." When the metric becomes reality, people work to make the metric look good, often at a cost to what the metric is purportedly measuring. Via Chris Correa. [Tags: Online Learning, Assessment, United States, Schools, Games and Gaming] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: Hits] Boris Mann is "confused" but I find this to be very good news. OpenID is a system that is very similar to my own mIDm, specifically in that it is a distributed identity system - no centralized registry. Mann suggests, "I would follow this up with support for multiple identity protocols - that is, after all, Canter's Law: work with everything. You could have a single identity hosted by VeriSign and accessible via a variety of protocols, from OpenID to DIX to SAML to InfoCard." But no, you can't, not unless you can get the identity client and the service provider to agree to the same set of protocols, and the problem with identity just has been that identity brokers (remember Passport?) are demanding more than clients are willing to allow. More info, from Verisign.
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[link: 2 Hits] Survey article on language acquisition, written mostly from a Chomskyist perspective. Good overview, with a nice explanation of Chomsky's views on a universal grammar. If you're familiar with language acquisition theory this will add nothing new, but if this is a new area for you this is a good place to start. [Tags: ] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

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I want and visualize and aspire toward a system of society and learning where each person is able to rise to his or her fullest potential without social or financial encumberance, where they may express themselves fully and without reservation through art, writing, athletics, invention, or even through their avocations or lifestyle.

Where they are able to form networks of meaningful and rewarding relationships with their peers,
with people who share the same interests or hobbies, the same political or religious affiliations - or different
interests or affiliations, as the case may be.

This to me is a society where knowledge and learning are public goods, freely created and shared,
not hoarded or withheld in order to extract wealth or influence.

This is what I aspire toward, this is what I work toward. - Stephen Downes